untitled

so anyway, i have nothing to say. i have had nothing to say for ten years, although obv. this hasn't stopped me from saying it, but i feel drained even of the ability to do the blah blah. i was never very interesting, so you're not missing much.

i do feel though that in other circumstances i could blog interestingly and at length, and would have a readership in the thousands. the same with my writing. i could do it, if i had anything i wanted to write about. but i don't. i don't care to share any more.

i have been watching Control, the film about Ian Curtis. i've only watched the start but i know the story of course. what's immediately apparent, if you do not know, is that he made the mistake of marrying someone who didn't understand poetry, or rather didn't understand that a poet is only able to express themselves in a way you can't because they're not like you. i made the same mistake, although when we were first married, mrs zen was thrilled that i was different from her. she recognised the value of our difference, and frankly, saw the gap as a positive in my account. i think she has reversed that view, or at least feels she has gained what she can from it. i think she is wrong.

you know, i don't expect to gain anything from knowing you. i don't think of people in that way. maybe i should. it's not that i don't think you have anything to give me. i just hate circumscribing what you can be before you've shown me. i don't know whether that makes any sense. but i know that it's the reason i married mrs zen. i am willing to be surprised. the problem i now have is that i do not like her and i do not believe she can surprise me. none of that means we cannot rebuild our relationship. i will tell you what does. mrs zen wanted a man who would love her and only her, and would match her beliefs of what being loved entails. she also made a very poor choice. actually, i don't think mine was bad, because i couldn't have known that she would change into a person i couldn't like; but fuck me, hers was, because she knew i wasn't that person, and she could be sure that i would not be changing into the man she wanted.

i feel the past four years have been wasted for me; worse than wasted, desolated. they have been empty and unproductive. i don't know how to change that. it's easy to make prescriptions, but you don't have the same perspective that i do on it.

but why? it's hard to explain. it's like you only have so much mind, and if you fill it, you can't use it for other things. does that make sense, or would it make more sense to think that you have the capacity to expand your mind and think more? am i purposely limiting myself because i'm scared of being bigger? that's something i need to think about, but here's the paradox: i can't expand my mind enough to think about that! so i think going home would improve things because i would rid myself of the negative thinking i do about living here, which is far greater than any i would do about living there. but i can't just go home and leave my family. i would then only be able to think about my children.

it is pointless telling me i'm mentally ill. i know i think differently from you. but it's the source of what's good about me; it's why i'm creative at all (and i do believe i'm capable of art that you aren't). i wouldn't give it up.

and you know what it is, why i don't blog interestingly about whatever? my heart's not in it. i'm only good when it is. you look back over my posts and you'll see that i was best when i meant it. so yeah, i can write about Darfur or the global economy or football or politics or music, all of which i know enough about to have a view that you'd read and maybe think yeah that's an interesting view, but there is nothing in me that wants to.

this is what i said in Looney's comments about poetry:

"The key to poetry is, for me, absolutely unrestrained expression. You have to go to the place where you are uncovered, underneath your persona, where your naked flame is. I think you know what I mean. Then let that speak. Do not fake it or censor it."

and i truly believe that.

but do you know how fucking difficult it is to burrow down into yourself and find that flame when you have become unsure you even have one?

Monday, February 18, 2008

none of the people down there care

sometimes i sit in the schoolyard and i wish i could speak to the people who are sitting inside the shells that they think are the people they are.

other times, i cannot stop thinking we are bundles of nothing, and what's the point, but the point is, we are bundles of nothing in a world that confuses and mystifies us because sometimes we feel that we are disconnected from it.

from time to time, i realise that i will die, that there is no hope whatsoever of anything continuing, because i am not real, and a switch will be turned off and that will be all there was.

i started feeling like that when i turned *mumbles* because i started to realise that i could die. i find the feeling elementally terrifying. i feel though that i could almost step across the line, and find it thrilling. sometimes i realise that the reason i will not is that it would give me licence to destroy myself in one way or another.

sometimes i want to touch the world, and sometimes i do not want the world to touch me.

***

today in the broadway mall on queen st, i was looking at a woman, she was wearing oldfashioned clothes but she couldn't have been thirty and was probably a lot younger. i don't just mean she was wearing a dress, or wasn't in anything funky or cool. i mean she was in clothes even your granny would think twice about. her hair was carefully brushed, with an enormous part. i imagined she would love books and the arts. she was eating a salad.

yesterday, we went to new farm park. my parents and i walked down to the riverside to get coffee from a bar there. the bar was quite busy. this is near to the powerhouse, so the crowd was the same crowd you would see in a theatre: nice, middle-class people mostly.

a woman sat with a friend looked the spit of s. i was quite taken aback at first. i mean, i've never met s, but this woman looked like a 3d version of the 2d s, or at least of the pictures that s claimed were her.

do you think it is terrible or wonderful to know people who you could not trust to send a real photo of themselves?

i am smiling as i write it, because i think it is both terrible and wonderful at the same time, and of course, i would never do that myself simply because it would not occur to me to. if i didn't want you to see my picture, you just wouldn't. if you bothered me for one, i'd just say no, and if you didn't stop, i'd realise that you weren't someone i wanted to remain friendly with.

i wanted to talk to the woman, but a/ i do not speak to strangers if i can help it because, well, i have no idea why actually, and one of these days i am going simply to say fuck it, and start doing it, because i am an acquired taste maybe but you can't acquire me if you're never given the chance, hey? and b/ i had no idea what i could say that wouldn't sound, you know, cuckoo. hello, you look enough like someone i sort of know that i want to sleep with you, but i probably couldn't explain exactly why, but part of it is that you look lonely in the same way she is, and i feel that you would enjoy it even though to look at me, at first glance, you mightn't think so, because i am not like the other men here, not quite, well not at all, because they are privileged guys who have never really thought about what they consist of and what they can do for you, but i have, and that is worth a lot more than you'd think.

the woman in the mall was looking around, as i do sometimes when i'm on my own. she sighed once or twice. i thought for a moment that perhaps she had seen me and recognised a kindred soul, and wished she could come and talk to me. i've felt like that, but who is kindred to me, really? wouldn't she realise soon enough that she had made a terrible mistake?

***

i hate it when people judge that knowing me was a mistake. yeah, they're probably right but i hate it all the same. i just never feel like that. i can be negative about you, but i will allow you to redeem yourself, and i won't stop giving you chances to do that. and once you have, once i feel you are good, i will never stop thinking that you are.

i miss people who disappear. i sometimes feel that they are unfinished stories, and i've never become used to that.

the other day, a, a friend from uni, came to visit. we never quite got it on when we were younger, although we could have done, and i was always into her. she is in great shape now, much better than ever before. she has been spending time in the gym and age has done her a favour or two, as it does some women, even though they think it won't.

she had her husband with her, a sour, dour type, whom i could only think she had married for the money. and of course mrs z was there too. life is like that. i will never have an hour alone with a, unless i pursued it strongly, and i won't.

i don't know whether you'd consider that a good or a bad thing. sometimes i feel that i am afraid of dying only because of an inability to judge, and beyond that, a fear that i will suddenly discover how to judge, and be horrified by the judgement.

Friday, February 15, 2008

and when Congress outlaws it, Bush will veto that. and the Republican party will back that.

is there even a choice in November? if you vote Republican, let's face it, you are voting for your nation to be a lawless torture state. it's not just Arabs. don't think it is. it's you and your family one day, if you are in their way.

we are supposed to be defending our values, aren't we? what are they? liberty and the rule of law?

the rule of law does not mean law for those too weak to defy it. that was how barons ran the place. that is the jungle.

that is what we say we despise about them. we cannot equally love it about us.

there is a clear choice for America. Democratic or the abyss. neither is perfect but by fuck, you don't want the abyss.

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

reviews

the following reviews are the property of Amazon, but as we all know, property is theft:

Sea of the Dying Dhow, *shels

4.0 out of 5 stars Fruity, 13 Feb 2008

I've seen *shels described as postmetal, metalcore, postrock and a million other things. For mine, they are at the metal end of postrock, with some nice metally vocals tossed in. You'd probably consider them a bit more proggy than the likes of Godspeed, but rather less arty than Isis. There's a lot more lyricism than bludgeoning riffs, but the power's there if that's what you like.

A lot of music in this space strives for the monumental. Bands like Cult of Luna and Callisto want to overwhelm you. But *shels are a lot more, well, fruity. Their palate is a lot broader and they're all the better for it. On a couple of the longer tracks, The conference of the birds and In dead palm fields in particular, they really hit the highs, but the menace is controlled, never losing their grip on the lovely melodies that distinguish them from the crowd (although each has some belting heavy stretches). This would definitely appeal to fans of Isis (particularly those who aren't so keen on the doomy growling) but also to postrockers who are willing to go a few steps heavier, particularly those who enjoy the shifting dynamics of Godspeed.

All Is Violent All Is Bright, God is an Astronaut2.0 out of 5 stars Mogwai meets Jean Michel Jarre, 13 Feb 2008

In most types of music, you have a leading edge, which does exciting and innovative things, and you have a body of groups that make music in the same vein. Some of those groups tone down the excitement, as it were, by smoothing out the edges of the music. This is one of those groups.

I imagine there is a market for this and possibly you're part of that market. If you find some postrock just a bit too heavy or abstract, this is for you. It's a lot like Mogwai meets Jean Michel Jarre. I'm not kidding. If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, you'll enjoy this. It's not horribly bad (and the two stars are sort of two to three, depending how I am feeling) but it doesn't rock. It plods. It plods nicely, but it doesn't take off. It's quite shoegazey, but it's not My Bloody Valentine. There's no edge. It's more Slowdive. With more Enya. I see this record linked to from a lot of heavier records -- even stuff like Isis and Pelican. But this is a million miles from that. It's a lot less furrowed brow, a lot more nice cup of tea and a biccy. You could probably meditate to it. See, if you are part of the market for this, that will sound very appealing. If not, you'll be suitably put off.

Enjoy Eternal Bliss, Yndi Halda

3.0 out of 5 stars Postrock by the numbers, 13 Feb 2008

You know, if you're into the usual postrock icon bands: Godspeed, Mogwai, Explosions, you'll really want to like this. And maybe you will like it a lot. It's possible. But it's not mindblowing, nothing new, just postrock by the numbers. Don't expect anything else. That's not to say it's not enjoyable, or that it isn't worthwhile. Most genres are stuffed full of bands who just do what everyone else does, and that's okay. It's why you'll want to like this. There's a fair bit of each of the big postrock bands in it: some martial drumming, some lyrical passages, buildups to the big atmospheric payoff, tinkling vibes. But you may just catch yourself yawning towards the end of one of these tracks, because exciting it ain't.

Bleak Epiphanies in Slow Motion, Latitudes

4.0 out of 5 stars Boom!, 13 Feb 2008

Probably the best way to describe little-known bands is to pick the better-known band they are most like and explain how they are different. So I'll do that.

It's like someone listened to Pelican and went, dude, that's not heavy enough, let's ten times the heavy and see what we have. What we have is music that will take the paint off your walls. Not that Latitudes sacrifice melody or nuance.

Well okay. Nuance is a bit in short supply. But the music is not unsatisfying. It's just more something to chew on than to sip like fine wine. Robust. Although it's fairly progressive, you're likely to come away from the first listen a bit weak at the knees. It's not really comparable with Isis, at least not later Isis, because the indie sensibility that has gradually shifted Isis away from metal and towards postrock is missing. Latitudes rock hard and you'll feel rocked by it. If you like that feeling, that you've been worked over by a record (and I do), you'll love this.

This Will Destroy You, This Will Destroy You

5.0 out of 5 stars Explodes, 12 Feb 2008

So you come from Texas, and you make postrock. You're going to be compared with Explosions in the Sky. The question then is, how well do you compare?

On their first effort, Young Mountain, TWDY didn't compare all that well. For all the praise that minialbum received, it was fairly workaday postrock. It didn't have that whoah there go the hairs on my neck thing going on.

This does.

TWDY do not simply plough the quiet-loud furrow. Several of the songs here are meditative, tranquil and deep. Rather than always aim at the soaring crescendos beloved of postrockers, they build moods. And where on Young Mountain, they sometimes missed, and ended up in a mire of postrock cliche, here they hit the heights. They've been compared with Sigur Ros and I think moodwise, they're getting close. Nothing here has quite the impact of Von from Heim, but there's some deeply moving stuff on here. If you love Mono, EITS, the more ambient Mogwai, this is your new favourite record.

reviews

the following reviews are the property of Amazon, but as we all know, property is theft:

Sea of the Dying Dhow, *shels

4.0 out of 5 stars Fruity, 13 Feb 2008

I've seen *shels described as postmetal, metalcore, postrock and a million other things. For mine, they are at the metal end of postrock, with some nice metally vocals tossed in. You'd probably consider them a bit more proggy than the likes of Godspeed, but rather less arty than Isis. There's a lot more lyricism than bludgeoning riffs, but the power's there if that's what you like.

A lot of music in this space strives for the monumental. Bands like Cult of Luna and Callisto want to overwhelm you. But *shels are a lot more, well, fruity. Their palate is a lot broader and they're all the better for it. On a couple of the longer tracks, The conference of the birds and In dead palm fields in particular, they really hit the highs, but the menace is controlled, never losing their grip on the lovely melodies that distinguish them from the crowd (although each has some belting heavy stretches). This would definitely appeal to fans of Isis (particularly those who aren't so keen on the doomy growling) but also to postrockers who are willing to go a few steps heavier, particularly those who enjoy the shifting dynamics of Godspeed.

All Is Violent All Is Bright, God is an Astronaut2.0 out of 5 stars Mogwai meets Jean Michel Jarre, 13 Feb 2008

In most types of music, you have a leading edge, which does exciting and innovative things, and you have a body of groups that make music in the same vein. Some of those groups tone down the excitement, as it were, by smoothing out the edges of the music. This is one of those groups.

I imagine there is a market for this and possibly you're part of that market. If you find some postrock just a bit too heavy or abstract, this is for you. It's a lot like Mogwai meets Jean Michel Jarre. I'm not kidding. If that sounds like something you'd enjoy, you'll enjoy this. It's not horribly bad (and the two stars are sort of two to three, depending how I am feeling) but it doesn't rock. It plods. It plods nicely, but it doesn't take off. It's quite shoegazey, but it's not My Bloody Valentine. There's no edge. It's more Slowdive. With more Enya. I see this record linked to from a lot of heavier records -- even stuff like Isis and Pelican. But this is a million miles from that. It's a lot less furrowed brow, a lot more nice cup of tea and a biccy. You could probably meditate to it. See, if you are part of the market for this, that will sound very appealing. If not, you'll be suitably put off.

Enjoy Eternal Bliss, Yndi Halda

3.0 out of 5 stars Postrock by the numbers, 13 Feb 2008

You know, if you're into the usual postrock icon bands: Godspeed, Mogwai, Explosions, you'll really want to like this. And maybe you will like it a lot. It's possible. But it's not mindblowing, nothing new, just postrock by the numbers. Don't expect anything else. That's not to say it's not enjoyable, or that it isn't worthwhile. Most genres are stuffed full of bands who just do what everyone else does, and that's okay. It's why you'll want to like this. There's a fair bit of each of the big postrock bands in it: some martial drumming, some lyrical passages, buildups to the big atmospheric payoff, tinkling vibes. But you may just catch yourself yawning towards the end of one of these tracks, because exciting it ain't.

Bleak Epiphanies in Slow Motion, Latitudes

4.0 out of 5 stars Boom!, 13 Feb 2008

Probably the best way to describe little-known bands is to pick the better-known band they are most like and explain how they are different. So I'll do that.

It's like someone listened to Pelican and went, dude, that's not heavy enough, let's ten times the heavy and see what we have. What we have is music that will take the paint off your walls. Not that Latitudes sacrifice melody or nuance.

Well okay. Nuance is a bit in short supply. But the music is not unsatisfying. It's just more something to chew on than to sip like fine wine. Robust. Although it's fairly progressive, you're likely to come away from the first listen a bit weak at the knees. It's not really comparable with Isis, at least not later Isis, because the indie sensibility that has gradually shifted Isis away from metal and towards postrock is missing. Latitudes rock hard and you'll feel rocked by it. If you like that feeling, that you've been worked over by a record (and I do), you'll love this.

This Will Destroy You, This Will Destroy You

5.0 out of 5 stars Explodes, 12 Feb 2008

So you come from Texas, and you make postrock. You're going to be compared with Explosions in the Sky. The question then is, how well do you compare?

On their first effort, Young Mountain, TWDY didn't compare all that well. For all the praise that minialbum received, it was fairly workaday postrock. It didn't have that whoah there go the hairs on my neck thing going on.

This does.

TWDY do not simply plough the quiet-loud furrow. Several of the songs here are meditative, tranquil and deep. Rather than always aim at the soaring crescendos beloved of postrockers, they build moods. And where on Young Mountain, they sometimes missed, and ended up in a mire of postrock cliche, here they hit the heights. They've been compared with Sigur Ros and I think moodwise, they're getting close. Nothing here has quite the impact of Von from Heim, but there's some deeply moving stuff on here. If you love Mono, EITS, the more ambient Mogwai, this is your new favourite record.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

sorry

so anyway, tomorrow we say sorry to the indigenous people of Australia. it is the first step in a process of reconciliation, in which we will try to put right some of the wrong we have done the first Australians.

there is a great deal of quibbling about it. the right claims we have nothing to be sorry for: we weren't here then, we never did nuffink, we were doing them a favour. the centre doesn't want to pay reparations. i think we should. the Stolen Generation were shattered by what was done to them.

it doesn't matter who exactly was responsible. we take collective responsibility because that is what a nation does. we should apologise, and i'm delighted that finally we are doing so. we should pay the indigenous people the billion dollars they believe they are due. it's a small price to pay for their accepting that we too may live here, in amity with them. it's not enough for forgiveness. that cannot be bought. they will forgive us if they can find it in their hearts.

i am not an Australian, but i am part of Australia. i unreservedly join Kevin Rudd in apologising to the indigenous people for what they have suffered, and still suffer, and i believe we should remain sorry until every indigenous child has the same life chances my children do.

i will be a little prouder of Australia at 9am tomorrow. if Kevin Rudd achieves nothing else in his tenure as PM, he will at least be the leader who had the common human decency to begin the healing this nation needs.

sorry

so anyway, tomorrow we say sorry to the indigenous people of Australia. it is the first step in a process of reconciliation, in which we will try to put right some of the wrong we have done the first Australians.

there is a great deal of quibbling about it. the right claims we have nothing to be sorry for: we weren't here then, we never did nuffink, we were doing them a favour. the centre doesn't want to pay reparations. i think we should. the Stolen Generation were shattered by what was done to them.

it doesn't matter who exactly was responsible. we take collective responsibility because that is what a nation does. we should apologise, and i'm delighted that finally we are doing so. we should pay the indigenous people the billion dollars they believe they are due. it's a small price to pay for their accepting that we too may live here, in amity with them. it's not enough for forgiveness. that cannot be bought. they will forgive us if they can find it in their hearts.

i am not an Australian, but i am part of Australia. i unreservedly join Kevin Rudd in apologising to the indigenous people for what they have suffered, and still suffer, and i believe we should remain sorry until every indigenous child has the same life chances my children do.

i will be a little prouder of Australia at 9am tomorrow. if Kevin Rudd achieves nothing else in his tenure as PM, he will at least be the leader who had the common human decency to begin the healing this nation needs.

free

so anyway, a short note on freedom, which is a precious commodity. it's been talked down and debased somewhat by rightists who use it as a flag for measures that basically infringe on it, but despite that, it is a treasure for us, which should be nurtured and defended.

i am a statist, and i do not see any conflict between that and a basic libertarianism, simply because i think a big state is the best means to protect my freedom from others. however, i do think there are limits, and those are my subject here.

because i think the bottom line in freedom is that you should be free to do what i do not approve of. i may or may not have the means to punish you for it, but i should not be in a position to prevent you from making the bad choice, particularly because which choices are bad is rarely something that can be decided objectively.

i hold this belief simply because restricting choices to those the state, or i, or you, think good is not freedom, and the more you, i, or the state restricts your choices, the more it infringes on your freedom. in discussing this, of course one should not lose sight of the state's responsibility to protect others from your choices. however, it is wrong, in my view, to suggest that the state's duty to protect us simply outweighs its duty to protect our freedom, or not to infringe on it.

in my view, the state can overstep the mark in two areas. one is that it can seek to protect you from your own choices. the other is that it can make it impossible to choose.

the first area is expressed in laws that seek to "uphold morality". morality is, almost without exception, the enemy of freedom. freedom is, if it is anything at all, the freedom to be wrong. when we say that you have the right to free speech, we mean that you have the right to say what i don't like to hear. when we say that you have the right to free assembly, we mean that you have the right to assemble for ends that i don't approve of.

because i believe freedom is a treasure, i oppose any legislation of morality. where immoral choices bring harm, i have no problem with punishing the harm. so i would not punish prostitution, even though i strongly disapprove of it, but i would severely punish trafficking. i would not punish the possession or use of drugs, but i would severely punish selling them to minors (because i believe that even though we have drawn our boundaries arbitrarily, we are correct to consider that minors may not have the freedoms we do--few parents would disagree! i might redefine "minor" in this context though.).

i do not believe the state has any right to protect you from any abuse you do to yourself. whether it has the right to restrict its services to you is another question. should a state be allowed to withhold healthcare from people who pursue practices that it does not approve of? possibly. but here i think that it is very difficult to ensure equity. is it worse to be a smoker than to eat a lot of fat? is it worse to eat a lot of fat than a lot of meat? this quickly becomes a grey area, with the government, claiming to have the right to withhold generally available services from you, which you are taxed to pay for, because you do not pursue behaviour it thinks you should.

i think that here the government starts to infringe on your freedom in the second way, by attempting to limit your choices to ones that it believes proper. it does this in other ways. one that is striking is the use of cctv.

the UK has millions of cameras, and the number is increasing. it's not impossible that within my lifetime, every street in the UK will be covered. why should i worry? i'm not doing anything wrong, am i?

well, true, but what is cctv for? is it to help catch people doing bad? i don't think so. i think it exists quite obviously to prevent people from doing bad. i cannot consider that a good thing, particularly because its presence serves to stop us from doing other things that are quite neutral.

i do not assent to measures that prevent bad as readily as i do to measures that punish it. without wishing to set up a slippery slope, one can ask, if we accept cameras to dissuade us from bad behaviour, why should we not have informers? knowing that your neighbour might be a spy, ready to tell the government when you do something ill, or eat a burger, or smoke a reefer, should have a dissuading effect. (one might note that the state has already gone down this path, with Crimestoppers numbers and the like. you could readily argue that Crimestoppers does not exist to punish crime but to prevent it, because its effect should be to add a complication to a wrongdoer's calculus. again, if you do no wrong, you have "nothing to fear" from Crimestoppers, unless your neighbour grasses you up for something you haven't done.)

importantly, cctv removes your right to privacy. you are open to scrutiny whatever you do. the watcher can see you doing good, bad and indifferent. the right to privacy is the right to do what i do not approve of without my interference. i believe it to be fundamental because other rights are built on it. the right to free speech, for instance, depends on the right to freedom of thought, which in turn depends on your thoughts being private.

think about this though. what is a food standard? it is a means the government uses to prevent a food producer from making a choice that could harm you. food standards prevent the food producer from producing food freely. and you will read rightists who criticise standards for this reason. however, and i think this is crucial, food standards only prevent bad outcomes. there is no good outcome to eating dirty food. true, the bad outcome may not eventuate, but you won't gain anything from it, except that the food might be cheaper.

but you could say the same about seatbelts, i suppose. the difference is that you are harming no one else if you do not wear a belt. (i am strongly opposed to seatbelt laws for the individual, but strongly in favour of them for minors.) i think a law that requires you to have seatbelts in your car is fair, but one that requires you to ensure that all your passengers are wearing them is not.

can food standards be conceived as punishments, not restrictions? if food is tested and you are fined for its being dirty, does this work? i think it probably does, and conceptually, i think this is how standards in food, in the environment and so on should be framed. i do not think that the rightists are wrong, necessarily, when they suggest that restrictions are a bad thing, and that the government is out of line where it tries to prevent you from choosing wrongly. there is another side to the coin though, and here they and i part company. if i want to poison you by selling you bad food, i should be permitted to. but if i do, i should not think that i can escape by suggesting that i bear no personal responsibility. more freedom needs stronger retribution in my view. if a company poisons you by evading food standards, those of its executives and employees who knowingly allowed it should be punished just as any other poisoner, any other killer, any other wrongdoer would be.

free

so anyway, a short note on freedom, which is a precious commodity. it's been talked down and debased somewhat by rightists who use it as a flag for measures that basically infringe on it, but despite that, it is a treasure for us, which should be nurtured and defended.

i am a statist, and i do not see any conflict between that and a basic libertarianism, simply because i think a big state is the best means to protect my freedom from others. however, i do think there are limits, and those are my subject here.

because i think the bottom line in freedom is that you should be free to do what i do not approve of. i may or may not have the means to punish you for it, but i should not be in a position to prevent you from making the bad choice, particularly because which choices are bad is rarely something that can be decided objectively.

i hold this belief simply because restricting choices to those the state, or i, or you, think good is not freedom, and the more you, i, or the state restricts your choices, the more it infringes on your freedom. in discussing this, of course one should not lose sight of the state's responsibility to protect others from your choices. however, it is wrong, in my view, to suggest that the state's duty to protect us simply outweighs its duty to protect our freedom, or not to infringe on it.

in my view, the state can overstep the mark in two areas. one is that it can seek to protect you from your own choices. the other is that it can make it impossible to choose.

the first area is expressed in laws that seek to "uphold morality". morality is, almost without exception, the enemy of freedom. freedom is, if it is anything at all, the freedom to be wrong. when we say that you have the right to free speech, we mean that you have the right to say what i don't like to hear. when we say that you have the right to free assembly, we mean that you have the right to assemble for ends that i don't approve of.

because i believe freedom is a treasure, i oppose any legislation of morality. where immoral choices bring harm, i have no problem with punishing the harm. so i would not punish prostitution, even though i strongly disapprove of it, but i would severely punish trafficking. i would not punish the possession or use of drugs, but i would severely punish selling them to minors (because i believe that even though we have drawn our boundaries arbitrarily, we are correct to consider that minors may not have the freedoms we do--few parents would disagree! i might redefine "minor" in this context though.).

i do not believe the state has any right to protect you from any abuse you do to yourself. whether it has the right to restrict its services to you is another question. should a state be allowed to withhold healthcare from people who pursue practices that it does not approve of? possibly. but here i think that it is very difficult to ensure equity. is it worse to be a smoker than to eat a lot of fat? is it worse to eat a lot of fat than a lot of meat? this quickly becomes a grey area, with the government, claiming to have the right to withhold generally available services from you, which you are taxed to pay for, because you do not pursue behaviour it thinks you should.

i think that here the government starts to infringe on your freedom in the second way, by attempting to limit your choices to ones that it believes proper. it does this in other ways. one that is striking is the use of cctv.

the UK has millions of cameras, and the number is increasing. it's not impossible that within my lifetime, every street in the UK will be covered. why should i worry? i'm not doing anything wrong, am i?

well, true, but what is cctv for? is it to help catch people doing bad? i don't think so. i think it exists quite obviously to prevent people from doing bad. i cannot consider that a good thing, particularly because its presence serves to stop us from doing other things that are quite neutral.

i do not assent to measures that prevent bad as readily as i do to measures that punish it. without wishing to set up a slippery slope, one can ask, if we accept cameras to dissuade us from bad behaviour, why should we not have informers? knowing that your neighbour might be a spy, ready to tell the government when you do something ill, or eat a burger, or smoke a reefer, should have a dissuading effect. (one might note that the state has already gone down this path, with Crimestoppers numbers and the like. you could readily argue that Crimestoppers does not exist to punish crime but to prevent it, because its effect should be to add a complication to a wrongdoer's calculus. again, if you do no wrong, you have "nothing to fear" from Crimestoppers, unless your neighbour grasses you up for something you haven't done.)

importantly, cctv removes your right to privacy. you are open to scrutiny whatever you do. the watcher can see you doing good, bad and indifferent. the right to privacy is the right to do what i do not approve of without my interference. i believe it to be fundamental because other rights are built on it. the right to free speech, for instance, depends on the right to freedom of thought, which in turn depends on your thoughts being private.

think about this though. what is a food standard? it is a means the government uses to prevent a food producer from making a choice that could harm you. food standards prevent the food producer from producing food freely. and you will read rightists who criticise standards for this reason. however, and i think this is crucial, food standards only prevent bad outcomes. there is no good outcome to eating dirty food. true, the bad outcome may not eventuate, but you won't gain anything from it, except that the food might be cheaper.

but you could say the same about seatbelts, i suppose. the difference is that you are harming no one else if you do not wear a belt. (i am strongly opposed to seatbelt laws for the individual, but strongly in favour of them for minors.) i think a law that requires you to have seatbelts in your car is fair, but one that requires you to ensure that all your passengers are wearing them is not.

can food standards be conceived as punishments, not restrictions? if food is tested and you are fined for its being dirty, does this work? i think it probably does, and conceptually, i think this is how standards in food, in the environment and so on should be framed. i do not think that the rightists are wrong, necessarily, when they suggest that restrictions are a bad thing, and that the government is out of line where it tries to prevent you from choosing wrongly. there is another side to the coin though, and here they and i part company. if i want to poison you by selling you bad food, i should be permitted to. but if i do, i should not think that i can escape by suggesting that i bear no personal responsibility. more freedom needs stronger retribution in my view. if a company poisons you by evading food standards, those of its executives and employees who knowingly allowed it should be punished just as any other poisoner, any other killer, any other wrongdoer would be.

Monday, February 11, 2008

gamble

so anyway, if you want to gamble, there's one thing you have to know. no matter what you put your money into, you can't change your luck. (boots will be seething, but really, you can't.) what you can do is put more money in when the odds favour you, and less when they don't. if they never will, as they never do in games like craps or roulette, you can never win, and should not gamble. leave that to the suckers.

what does it mean, to take the best of it? one of two things. sometimes you have an edge but the amount you can bet is limited for some reason. in this case, you want to repeat the bet as often as you can. (a good example is a sitngo poker tourney. say you have an edge in a $10 sng. obv. you can only wager $10 at a time. so to get more money on, you play more than one table at the same time.)

the other case usually occurs in games in which either there are many opportunities to bet, but only some favour you (horseracing is a good example of this: you should not bet every race, because not every race will offer a good bet), or games in which you must bet at every opportunity to stay in, but only some of the time will you have an edge (a good example is blackjack, where most of the time the house has an edge, but sometimes you do, and if you count cards, you can know when that is).

what makes a successful gambler is information. in the first type of good betting, you have to recognise where you have an edge; in other words, you have to know where your skill is sufficient to beat others out of their money. it's no good playing ten tables of $20 sngs if you cannot beat one table of it; nor is it any good doing that if your edge degrades so much over ten tables that you no longer win. of course -- and this is central to all gambling -- it is not always simple to figure out your edge; sometimes, you cannot be sure that you even have one. i probably worry too much about this.

in the second type of good betting, you need to know when you have an edge and when you don't. in blackjack, as i noted, you figure this out by cardcounting. the margins are pretty slim in bj. if you learn basic strategy -- and i'm almost there with it -- you can cut the house's edge over you to .5%, which is very close to even. That's losing $5 in $1000. But the game changes over time, sometimes against you more than that, sometimes in your favour. you have to make up the bad times by whacking the money on when you're favoured.

of course, you do not win all time you're favoured. this is gambling, after all. but you win in the long term.

the long term is like a magic realm for gamblers. it's when everything works itself out. you cannot fix your luck. some days it goes your ways; some days it doesn't. it's tough to learn that, and tougher still to trust that you will win out if you stick with doing the right thing.

where things get interesting is horseracing. here, it's obvious that information is all important. you know you cannot beat the horses unless you understand them. but it's not so obvious that you must take the best of it, just the same as in bj or poker.

i'll explain, but first i'll digress.

when i was in my early twenties, i lived at home. i was totally unemployed and pretty much unemployable. but i was happy. i spent nearly every day, all day, in the bookies. i knew horses inside and out. i would double my dole money every week by betting the horses. i wasn't betting optimally, but i had a huge information advantage over most bettors. i was watching every race every day. i knew how that 2yo maiden had run at Yarmouth, because i'd seen it run.

but here's a thing. it's not how many winners you pick. look at this. say you check out one hundred races, and pick out 100 horses that are in your view evenmoney shots. for the purposes of this discussion, let's say that your information is good, you bet $1 a race, you are correct about the horses' chances, and also that you pay no tax. let's say your horses go off at 4/5. so you pick 50 winners and make $90. iow, you lose $10.

so you look at another 100 races and pick out horses that you think are 9/1. You put your $1 and each goes off at 10/1 (the astute reader will realise that these can be averages, and most handicappers will have some evenmoney shots go off at 5/4 and some at 4/6 and so on, although in fact we are looking to always beat the line we ourselves set). So 11 win, and you make $110.

see how you win more -- in fact, you win at all -- correctly backing the longer-priced horses than you would by backing more winners but at the wrong prices? this is horse handicapping in a nutshell. when you have sufficient information to handicap horses correctly, you can pick good bets at the bookies. it's not about which horse is most likely to win any given race but whether the set of horses you are betting offer better odds than they ought to. it's the long term. a horse that is 100 to 1 against winning but is offered at 200 to 1 is hugely profitable.

yeah, it sucks that you must risk 99 losers to get that profitable winner, but here's the thing: gamblers do not mind losing so long as their bet had a positive expectation. it's something i have to learn in poker. i can lose a lot but so long as i am betting with the best of it, it doesn't matter. give it time and the money will return with interest.

so i aim to play these three games. i play sngs okay, beating the $10 level, and i could expect to win a bit higher. i don't know how high. i am nearly there with basic strategy, and i am willing to put in the many hours of drilling i will need to count cards. it's going well though, and i think i can do that. and i plan to learn the British horses again.

in the last of those, i know that perfect information is impossible (although some elements of perfect info are very possible, such as knowing that a trainer will pull a horse, or knowing that a greyhound has a virus and will not run to his or her best), and even imperfect information is quite hard to come by, so i'll be looking for wide spreads. but if you correctly analyse 10/1 chances and they pay 20/1, you gain a ton by betting them. the same is true of evenmoney shots at 2/1, which is findable in markets in which information is fairly limited but most people in the market either lack it or can't be bothered learning it. maiden auctions come to mind.

you cannot change your luck. sometimes your horse falls at the first. you double down and hit an ace or deuce and dealer hits 17. you get it in with aces and the other guy flops his set. but everyone has the same chance of luck, if not the same luck. and you can ride the waves of luck, making sure that when you hit a peak, you have as much money as you can in play, and when you hit trough, you have as little as you can in play. learning how is not easy, but the difficulty lies not in knowing you have to surf, but learning how to recognise where you are on the wave.

well, it's no a science. i'm not relying on it, or risking what i don't have. but ir a year from now...

gamble

so anyway, if you want to gamble, there's one thing you have to know. no matter what you put your money into, you can't change your luck. (boots will be seething, but really, you can't.) what you can do is put more money in when the odds favour you, and less when they don't. if they never will, as they never do in games like craps or roulette, you can never win, and should not gamble. leave that to the suckers.

what does it mean, to take the best of it? one of two things. sometimes you have an edge but the amount you can bet is limited for some reason. in this case, you want to repeat the bet as often as you can. (a good example is a sitngo poker tourney. say you have an edge in a $10 sng. obv. you can only wager $10 at a time. so to get more money on, you play more than one table at the same time.)

the other case usually occurs in games in which either there are many opportunities to bet, but only some favour you (horseracing is a good example of this: you should not bet every race, because not every race will offer a good bet), or games in which you must bet at every opportunity to stay in, but only some of the time will you have an edge (a good example is blackjack, where most of the time the house has an edge, but sometimes you do, and if you count cards, you can know when that is).

what makes a successful gambler is information. in the first type of good betting, you have to recognise where you have an edge; in other words, you have to know where your skill is sufficient to beat others out of their money. it's no good playing ten tables of $20 sngs if you cannot beat one table of it; nor is it any good doing that if your edge degrades so much over ten tables that you no longer win. of course -- and this is central to all gambling -- it is not always simple to figure out your edge; sometimes, you cannot be sure that you even have one. i probably worry too much about this.

in the second type of good betting, you need to know when you have an edge and when you don't. in blackjack, as i noted, you figure this out by cardcounting. the margins are pretty slim in bj. if you learn basic strategy -- and i'm almost there with it -- you can cut the house's edge over you to .5%, which is very close to even. That's losing $5 in $1000. But the game changes over time, sometimes against you more than that, sometimes in your favour. you have to make up the bad times by whacking the money on when you're favoured.

of course, you do not win all time you're favoured. this is gambling, after all. but you win in the long term.

the long term is like a magic realm for gamblers. it's when everything works itself out. you cannot fix your luck. some days it goes your ways; some days it doesn't. it's tough to learn that, and tougher still to trust that you will win out if you stick with doing the right thing.

where things get interesting is horseracing. here, it's obvious that information is all important. you know you cannot beat the horses unless you understand them. but it's not so obvious that you must take the best of it, just the same as in bj or poker.

i'll explain, but first i'll digress.

when i was in my early twenties, i lived at home. i was totally unemployed and pretty much unemployable. but i was happy. i spent nearly every day, all day, in the bookies. i knew horses inside and out. i would double my dole money every week by betting the horses. i wasn't betting optimally, but i had a huge information advantage over most bettors. i was watching every race every day. i knew how that 2yo maiden had run at Yarmouth, because i'd seen it run.

but here's a thing. it's not how many winners you pick. look at this. say you check out one hundred races, and pick out 100 horses that are in your view evenmoney shots. for the purposes of this discussion, let's say that your information is good, you bet $1 a race, you are correct about the horses' chances, and also that you pay no tax. let's say your horses go off at 4/5. so you pick 50 winners and make $90. iow, you lose $10.

so you look at another 100 races and pick out horses that you think are 9/1. You put your $1 and each goes off at 10/1 (the astute reader will realise that these can be averages, and most handicappers will have some evenmoney shots go off at 5/4 and some at 4/6 and so on, although in fact we are looking to always beat the line we ourselves set). So 11 win, and you make $110.

see how you win more -- in fact, you win at all -- correctly backing the longer-priced horses than you would by backing more winners but at the wrong prices? this is horse handicapping in a nutshell. when you have sufficient information to handicap horses correctly, you can pick good bets at the bookies. it's not about which horse is most likely to win any given race but whether the set of horses you are betting offer better odds than they ought to. it's the long term. a horse that is 100 to 1 against winning but is offered at 200 to 1 is hugely profitable.

yeah, it sucks that you must risk 99 losers to get that profitable winner, but here's the thing: gamblers do not mind losing so long as their bet had a positive expectation. it's something i have to learn in poker. i can lose a lot but so long as i am betting with the best of it, it doesn't matter. give it time and the money will return with interest.

so i aim to play these three games. i play sngs okay, beating the $10 level, and i could expect to win a bit higher. i don't know how high. i am nearly there with basic strategy, and i am willing to put in the many hours of drilling i will need to count cards. it's going well though, and i think i can do that. and i plan to learn the British horses again.

in the last of those, i know that perfect information is impossible (although some elements of perfect info are very possible, such as knowing that a trainer will pull a horse, or knowing that a greyhound has a virus and will not run to his or her best), and even imperfect information is quite hard to come by, so i'll be looking for wide spreads. but if you correctly analyse 10/1 chances and they pay 20/1, you gain a ton by betting them. the same is true of evenmoney shots at 2/1, which is findable in markets in which information is fairly limited but most people in the market either lack it or can't be bothered learning it. maiden auctions come to mind.

you cannot change your luck. sometimes your horse falls at the first. you double down and hit an ace or deuce and dealer hits 17. you get it in with aces and the other guy flops his set. but everyone has the same chance of luck, if not the same luck. and you can ride the waves of luck, making sure that when you hit a peak, you have as much money as you can in play, and when you hit trough, you have as little as you can in play. learning how is not easy, but the difficulty lies not in knowing you have to surf, but learning how to recognise where you are on the wave.

well, it's no a science. i'm not relying on it, or risking what i don't have. but ir a year from now...

Thursday, February 07, 2008

musing

so i've been into postrock for a while, but you get so you can't even listen to stuff, you've heard it so often, or it just isn't floating your boat.

so i was buyuing some mono:

and i checked out a couple of the bands who were in the "you like this? you'll this then" section, and went to the myspace to check them out. one was god is an astronaut, which is postrock meets Jean Michel Jarre, iow, far too MOR for me. another was Russian Circles. you could describe it as "prog postrock" or "postrock meets metal". it's a more muscular sound than Explosions in the Sky or Mono. have a listen to the myspace and you'll get the picture. i put that chit on my ipod and i just left the world behind:

so i'm loving that, and loving Pelican too, which is a similar, heavy postrock. these bands are as influenced by Tortoise and that whole Chicago thing as they are by metal.

so i moved from that into Isis. i'd heard the name, read the fantastic reviews, but never bothered with it. now i do, in a big way, particularly Oceanic, which features:

and of course Panopticon, which features a longer version of this:

that chit is heavy, but also prog, which i sort of like. strange that i was burning hippies in the late 70s, but now i'm into a lot of that widdly nana stuff myself. well, you change, don't you?

from there, it's a short step to Dillinger Escape Plan, who can be described as heavy metal meets Aphex Twin on a lot of their stuff, but also do a good line in pop metal, for instance Black bubblegum:

and slightly more Jesus Lizard going on in the brilliant Milk lizard:

the album, Ire works, is just fucking brilliant, so inventive, so powerful. i defy you not to like it.

i also jumped from Isis one way to Cult of Luna and Callisto, who are sludgy, and Tool, who are proggy. not so keen on Tool, who tend to the dreary, but this is okay:

Cult of Luna fool you with the doomy vocals but the music is far more postrocky than metal, particularly on Dim, which you could easily play alongside anything by Mono, and even EITS.

as a kid, i was a huge fan of shoegaze, which was deeply uncool, but rather good. top shoegaze was stuff like My Bloody Valentine, and my personal favourites, Ride:

there's a whole new shoegaze thing, and Sennen are my particular favourites:

not an official video, you'll have noted. their myspace features Blackout, which i'm playing very heavily atm.

also shoegazey, but much heavier is Jesu. you may or may not recall a band called Napalm Death, one of whose main men was Justin Broadrick. he formed an "industrial" band called Godflesh:

Jesu have gradually become more shoegazey and less hardedged. this is a bad video but a fairly typical song:

so anyway, that's what i've been into. i've left this one great video for last, for anyone who has bothered wading through all that. it's Mclusky, the best thing ever to come out of Wales. you can't really describe this. it's sort of indie, sort of rawk, sort of madness in a can. it's also a lot of fun:

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

cat

it made me cry. not that i'm distressed about broken wildlife, but that someone is gentle with the pets we love when we have to make a decision that breaks our hearts.

i remember when my dad had our dog, s, put down. he was very ill. he had a tumour in his jaw. it was possible to operate, but the prognosis would still not be good, and the vet told us that s would likely have a lot of pain, even if he survived. so one day, i left for school (i had to take the train) and that night, my dad came to pick me up from the station. i knew why. i was angry that he had had s killed without speaking to me. s used to sleep every night on my bed. he had been part of our family since we moved back to the UK when i was two. my dad said he had turned downhill very quickly that morning and he had begun to suffer. he had brought s's collar, tag and lead with him; they were on the backseat. i realised that my dad was as broken up about it as i was.

a few years ago, mrs zen and i got a cat, o. it was a beautiful, spirited little thing. it was hit by a car and died in my arms, out on the pavement outside our house. i had to take her to the shelter, so that they could dispose of the body. i think that's the law here. in any case, i wasn't disposed to question whether it was, because i was renting and didn't want to bury her anyway.

i will never forget the drive to the shelter. our neighbour drove me for reasons i forget. we didn't say a word as he drove. when we got there, i handed her over and that was that.

cat

it made me cry. not that i'm distressed about broken wildlife, but that someone is gentle with the pets we love when we have to make a decision that breaks our hearts.

i remember when my dad had our dog, s, put down. he was very ill. he had a tumour in his jaw. it was possible to operate, but the prognosis would still not be good, and the vet told us that s would likely have a lot of pain, even if he survived. so one day, i left for school (i had to take the train) and that night, my dad came to pick me up from the station. i knew why. i was angry that he had had s killed without speaking to me. s used to sleep every night on my bed. he had been part of our family since we moved back to the UK when i was two. my dad said he had turned downhill very quickly that morning and he had begun to suffer. he had brought s's collar, tag and lead with him; they were on the backseat. i realised that my dad was as broken up about it as i was.

a few years ago, mrs zen and i got a cat, o. it was a beautiful, spirited little thing. it was hit by a car and died in my arms, out on the pavement outside our house. i had to take her to the shelter, so that they could dispose of the body. i think that's the law here. in any case, i wasn't disposed to question whether it was, because i was renting and didn't want to bury her anyway.

i will never forget the drive to the shelter. our neighbour drove me for reasons i forget. we didn't say a word as he drove. when we got there, i handed her over and that was that.

so this articulates brilliantly what i feel about the Clinton/Obama thing.

goodbye to turning him into a shining knight when actually he’s an astute, smooth pol with speechwriters who’ve worked with the Kennedys’ own speechwriter-courtier Ted Sorenson. If it’s only about ringing rhetoric, let speechwriters run. But isn’t it about getting the policies we want enacted?

even in rhetoric, she canes him though, as Morgan notes.

he talks in vague terms about "hope", "unity", "revolution", blah blah. the same vague shit that Bush used to con some of you into thinking he wasn't a neocon tool. it's not for nothing that wealthy centrists are among Obama's major supporters. they know he's not about to start any revolutions.

but look what Clinton says. in Beijing! having been warned to mind her place. this is fighting talk:

For too long, the history of women has been a history of silence. Even today, there are those who are trying to silence our words.It is a violation of human rights when babies are denied food, or drowned, or suffocated, or their spines broken, simply because they are born girls. It is a violation of human rights when woman and girls are sold into the slavery of prostitution. It is a violation of human rights when women are doused with gasoline, set on fire and burned to death because their marriage dowries are deemed too small. It is a violation of human rights when individual women are raped in their own communities and when thousands of women are subjected to rape as a tactic or prize of war. It is a violation of human rights when a leading cause of death worldwide along women ages 14 to 44 is the violence they are subjected to in their own homes. It is a violation of human rights when women are denied the right to plan their own families, and that includes being forced to have abortions or being sterilized against their will.Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely—and the right to be heard.

i won't fight for "hope", but i'd fight for my daughter's right to be my equal.

put aside the vicious hatred that is spewed in your media. they hate her because they are tools of the rich. put aside the vicious hatred on the left. they hate her for Iraq. but politicians have to compromise, they cannot be perfect. if Clinton was a man, as progressive as she is (more progressive than Obama by some way), with her record and her desire to bring about change, they would be lining up to endorse her.

i endorse her. you know why? i've seen Obama before. all promises, no record of action. he is a black Tony Blair. we ignored that Blair looked like he was full of shit because we wanted change, and well, he was full of shit. above all else, two things stand out for me. after eight years of America and the world getting fucked by the Repugnants, to the point at which even some on the right have become disgusted by them, Obama talks about "bipartisanship" and "reaching out". FUCK THAT! Clinton wants to kick those fuckers in the nuts. let her. second, and more important, America is in many ways a distressingly backward, ugly place. the rank sexism directed Clinton's way is reflected in a million places on the web, where you can see young American men indulging in behaviour that reflects a deep, odious hatred of women. the election of a woman is a slap in the face for America. you take a step towards places we have already walked through. keep moving forward.

pages

so anyway, we learned when studying Keats that the Romantics believed that an artist had to suffer, so they all starved, fought in revolutions, became junkies, whatever it took to feel they were experiencing the ups and downs of life.

whether privation really does inspire good art, i don't know, but my buddy Father Luke seems to prove the hypothesis. i don't know whether he'd consider himself a Romantic though. his writing is observational and natural, much too concrete for Romanticism. i don't think he'd subscribe to much of the premodern philosophy that they espoused either. it made more sense as a reaction to the excitement of the Enlightenment. we take being Enlightened for granted, and aim for for small-e enlightenment.

Father Luke is more the cynic. i don't consider that in any way an insult. (if you pay attention, you know i rate father luke very highly, and i wouldn't pick a description that i didn't consider high praise.) he's a big-C Cynic, as i'm inclined to be. the Cynics wanted to look beyond our conceptual framework to what is real. (Romantics also wanted to touch the real, but they believed the route you should take was different, and tended to the belief that the natural world was all that was real, and the constructed world of men never could be.) Diogenes, chief cynic, hated other people, because he thought they were all fakers. cynicism is a synonym of bitterness today because seeing through the bullshit is liable to leave you scarred. you are constantly disappointed that the world is so wrong and no one wants it to be right, that so many are only concerned with using the wrongness for gain, when we could easily all gain by doing right. we might or might not gain more as individuals, but our net gain would be huge. some people just aren't concerned with net gain.

Cynics are profoundly humanist. we are angry because we want better. we see what it is, and feel we are left with shouting to the world that this is what it is, can't you see.

we take the means that are open to us, and of course we lean to aphorism and poetry because these are the areas in which meaning can be most strongly expressed.

anyway, that's a big preamble for a small message, but it's a message i'm very glad to be able to spread in this small way. i am immensely proud of Father Luke today, because he is a published author. there is a book of poetry with his name on the cover, which i hope you will buy. it goes without saying that i strongly endorse it and urge you to buy a copy for anyone you know who appreciates a view at life that is not sheltered or blinkered.

no, dear. nobody works around here because they closed all the factories and even though you dumbed down the unis to the point at which degrees are worth only slightly more than bogroll, you have not created enough pathways for people at the bottom to get into decent employment because they can't see how they could ever gain sufficient qualifications to compete for the excellent jobs that people like you can get, and they don't really fancy working as what amounts to a slave or a skivvy at best, and who can blame them? it doesn't help that you saddle the poor fuckers with thousands in debt if they do try. ms Flint is probably not aware that working-class people traditionally do not like or understand debt. my granddad (my stepgranddad technically) never bought anything on credit, not even on HP. he never had a mortgage, and lived within his means completely. he would be a corporatist like ms Flint's worst nightmare. even i, an educated man, do not have much debt, and do not like to have any. i have some interest free, and occasionally a couple of hundred on my CC, but otherwise, nothing. i intend to borrow maybe 20K Aussie to get home, but that's a big step.

ms Flint also has some things to say about affordable housing. maybe if her colleague mr Brown had not pumped up the real-estate bubble, the problem would not be so bad. but anyway, we should begin with property as the first step to making this a just world. it's theft, you know.

now why do i say that? let me explain, briefly. it's just wrong that ms Flint has a comfy pad somewhere in London and some guy has to live in council housing because he wasn't born with her brains and opportunities. just. plain. wrong.

that's not negotiable. we should begin there. we can say, oh we can't fix all the wrong overnight, and that's okay. but we can't say that it's actually a feature, when it's one of the worst of the many bugs in Humanrace 1.0.

so I read this piece, and it seemed to sum up what i feel is just so wrong about the world. this particular part struck me:

'We all pretty much said the same thing,' Joffe recalls. 'Iraq is a very complicated country, there are tremendous intercommunal resentments, and don't imagine you'll be welcomed.' He remembers how Blair reacted. 'He looked at me and said, 'But the man's uniquely evil, isn't he?' I was a bit nonplussed. It didn't seem to be very relevant.'

exactly. the world is full of people who make the simple complex and the complex simple. much of life is easy to understand. people are rarely as complicated as they make out. you can mostly understand them in terms of greed and fear, it seems to me. the greed is an outcome of having evolved to survive privation--yes, that's a bit of evolutionary psychology, but the suggestion that we have a psychology that evolved to be a particular way is not ridiculous, even if you think it's wrong to conclude that women and men are how they are because they evolved in particular ways. (most theories of evolutionary psychology are simpleminded apologias for sexism, because you cannot know why we evolved one thing or another; you can only make the broadest-brush suggestions: so while we can say, i think, that we evolved to cope with privation, because after all, we must have suffered privation, and other things: our varied diet, our strong preference for fat, our adaptability, suggest that too, i don't think you can say that men are more function-oriented because they hunted etc etc.) but we don't strike me as all that complicated, although we build complicated worlds, usually pointlessly.

but, see, Blair didn't have the sophisticated tool he would have needed to nut out Iraq. he has no mind for it, because he is cunning but he is not clever, smart but not a thinking person. he can only conceive of societies as masses that follow leaders, and can be shaped as leaders want, because he has the illusion that that is what happened in the UK. it's not, of course. Blair has a monolithic sense of "good" and "bad". money good, god good, having good, going without bad. he couldn't parse Bush because he had to make him good or bad. that's not easy. i mean, is Bush bad? which is the true picture, the one he paints in rhetoric, of a man who thinks he is doing god's work, trying to bring freedom and peace, or the caricature we make of him, a puppet of oil interests, doing evil without a second thought?

i don't really know, and neither do you. maybe he's a fool; maybe he's a villain. he breaks things either way, so he's bad in that sense, but isn't it worse to intend wrong?

maybe i only think like that because i don't think i ever intend harm, but i do some from time to time. maybe i am incapable of analysing how people are without injecting myself into the equation. but i think that's okay. i shouldn't anyway be using a different standard to judge you by than i use for myself, should i? i don't think Kant actually proved that, but i think he gets a pass because we feel it.

i know what you're thinking. he is criticising Blair for taking a simplistic view of people, but he's saying that people are simple. how is he different? but however simple people are, their interplay isn't always. i mean that what they are pursuing may be easy to define in simple terms, but the process of their pursuing it may not. Blair cannot see that.

i noted that he wants to be European president, if the position involves having power. but what would he do with it? his "legacy" is to be remembered as an underachieving liar (well, underachieving may be too generous, because i suspect that his greatest lie was the suggestion that he had any ability to achieve anything for us), a glib entertainer with no core, who promised the world and delivered nothing much, a man who was only interested in the power and not so much in doing anything worthwhile with it, and finally, and most importantly, a murderer, willing to cause the deaths of many thousands of people as an exercise of that power that he stabbed and sleazed his way to obtaining.

we should not make him president of Europe. we should jail the fucker. but in this world, he will get statues, not manacles. pity.

too deranged

i actually feel like that sentence. you have no idea. i feel like all day long my teeth are set on edge, like cars are crashing in my head.

i need a break. but i do realise, you make your own breaks.

here's a thing though. my main gig, as was, pretty much vanished. in fact, the chick who was giving me work, g, has gone away for two months and didn't even tell me. so i guess they sacked me, more or less. but she didn't even tell me. well, i wasn't doing a great job, but most editors actually don't.

here it is though, she gives me this job this guy has been doing, and she emails me all the correspondence. and this guy has made lists and checklists, and she is writing to this other chick, perversely also g, and saying hey, this guy is thorough. in an approving way, like he is a supereditor.

but i spend hours fixing his fuckups, and correcting what he did wrong or didn't do at all. see, she has buttons and he, inadvertently i'm sure, presses them and i don't. i'm better value, but i forget to do something and she's ticked off and it's a matter of admin, and i'm thinking, actually, i shouldn't be carrying the can for it because it was actually someone else's thing to take care of. but that's what being an editor is.

(it strikes me that i should tell don, don, you're a decent guy, a thinking guy and i like you, but man, don't blog about blogging. if you want to tell us something, tell us and don't futz about. get a private blog and write it there. you are killing yourself with this chit man. get yourself some honesty. yeah, no one cares. well, that's okay, you can care enough all on your own.)

so that gig falls through and now my other decent gig, ten hours a week, writes me and "it's with a touch of sadness" the beancounters have decided you need to be sacked.

you know, this is truly wtf. I have done this job for two and a half years. i'm experienced in the field, all the people i work with like me and respect my work, but they sack me anyway, because it will save a few quid. every other solution will cost more in the long term, but this year they save a couple of grand.

well, whatever. i took a solid job because i was sick of worrying every couple of months, so i know i'll be okay, but it means i probably have to put off going home and that sucks.

and every time i start feeling good about things, they go wrong. i feel good about poker? time to lose a ton of money. i feel good about my marriage? mrs zen will soon put a stop to that by reminding me just what a fucking bitch she can be when she wants to. i actually only want the easy life, and it amazes me that she thinks i welcome complication.

you know, i have never been patient, and i always want it now. if i were more success oriented, this would actually be a good thing.

but i am distracted. i cannot concentrate and it's a real worry. i have just about given up writing because the whole time i'm like i want it to have been written and can't be bothered doing it. i already know how it is. i have whole novels in my head that i simply cannot be bothered writing. no one else wants to read them anyway.

i was very hurt that t said my book was boring. i could have lived with "poor" but boring hurt. i take small things to heart, while ignoring big things, and i know that's a flaw, but it's how i am. i would never tell me that i'm boring. i would have known i am sensitive about that. because i am boring, but only to you. to me, i am vaguely interesting. i almost wrote "endlessly fascinating" but nothing has fascinated me for several years now.

except for s. see, here's the thing with that. it's a small thing that some entirely fucking deranged person decides they don't like you. who knows what fucked-up calculus people like that use? you'd shrug it off mostly. oh well, the looney is drooling in some other quarter. but i actually didn't have a reason to like her, and that is intriguing in itself. i know why i like a, for instance, and l, i know why i like him for sure, and i like don because he's basically drowning and t because he's serious and m because he is just exactly what i like without being able to articulate what i like, and brc because they are my kids, and my mum because she is a fine human being and my dad because he isn't.

and myself because i understand what is likeable about me.

but s, no idea. i feel like i was being told a story and never reached the end. i still kind of hope she will write to me, ask for forgiveness (because she is very wrong about who needs to forgive who, after all, i never lied to her) and allow me to read the end of that book.

i realise p will be upset that i didn't put her in the list of people i like, but that was an abridged list of people i like and know the reasons -- there are more actually, because obviously i like sour grapes, uv, theminotaur etc etc, because they are people i have come to know, who are fundamentally decent and not entirely tiresome -- but p is special. i like her and have no idea why, and have felt like that since she first wrote to me, many years ago now. she is deeply mine in a way practically no one else is, part of me even, like my sister, my lover, my limb. but i have no idea why.

and you know, i have written this whole post so that i can smuggle in this message, which is that if i care about you, that won't change unless you do something seismic. i make a decision about you and it's made. everyone is like, well, fuck you. but if i connect with you, it's forever.

the other day, i was thinking, i have never dumped anyone. not ever. i've never ditched a gf, or even a friend. they've wandered away, or i've drifted, but i never canned anyone. and i will never can you, if you are my friend, i am incapable. i will still be here when all have left you, and you feel you are alone. you won't be, because i do not know how to stop loving you. i am too deranged to see how. see, you think it is a disability but i think it is my saving grace.

Saturday, February 02, 2008

skreeeeeeee

Hi

I want to make a formal complaint about the service you have provided.

I rely on my internet service for work. I need to be able to download documents that are sent to me quickly because I am an editor, and need quick page loads because I use online resources to support my work. I switched to a higher speed, and pay more for it, because of the benefit to me of quicker downloads and page loads.

Last month my service was "shaped" to dialup speeds. I was not warned in advance that I was approaching the limit, and maybe you are not aware, but it is very difficult to find the usage on your site. I spent ages before I actually found it. When I tried to contact you about this, I found that your phone support was not working. It still isn't now. I proceeded through the very irritating robots, which you have far too many of (do you know how irritating it is to hear the same cheery voice every time you ring telling you that there have been tons of calls and you probably will have to wait for ages to speak to someone? I had a technical problem a few months ago and it was the same story), and when I was told I would be connected, I was instead disconnected. This has happened to me five or six times. I have not been able to speak to anyone by phone.

So I left a message on your site. It seemed to go unanswered. I asked to be contacted by email, but wasn't. Nor was there anything in "My messages". Having to load up your site on dialup speed was very painful, but I had to do that to check whether you'd answered. I left another message, and another, and was increasingly angry that none of my messages seemed to be being answered. Nothing on your site indicates how you can find an answer. My messages were marked "Low importance" and "CLOSED" with no sign of a reply. By the way, my service might be of low importance to you, but it's very important to me. You might reconsider your priority levels. You are asked what mode of contact you prefer and I asked for an email. None came. Eventually, I figured out that you put a message on the "what you asked about page".

I don't know whether you have technical limitations that prevent you from offering it, but you should consider allowing customers to buy extra download capability. Because it's hard to check usage, someone who downloads a lot, as I did last month, particularly someone with kids, who play online computer games that are resource hungry, can slip over the limit without realising. Checking usage is not easy, because you do not display it prominently. You ought to.

So someone rang me from support and was aggressive and rude to me. Maybe she didn't understand how frustrating it is to be in my position but instead of being sympathetic, she was unpleasant. She said that you could check your usage on the site, but didn't say where. She said no one in the industry offered extra GBs, but I don't actually think this is a satisfactory answer. If you do not offer *better* service than others in the business, why should I use you? I had to hang up because I do not enjoy conflict and having a "support" person being aggressive towards me didn't seem a good way to spend my time. Your customers don't know how things are. If they need an explanation, that's because they lack information and it's frustrating, not because they want to upset you. Surely your support staff should be sympathetic to frustrated customers?

Anyway, I accepted that this is how you do business and gritted my teeth to see out the month. I consoled myself that my service would come back on February 1. No one told me that there was any question that it wouldn't. No one at any point explained how your system restores the service. No wonder. I would have been furious if they had, and rightly so.

On Friday morning, I fired up the internet, and was surprised to find that it was still at dialup speed. I asked your support why, and was told it would be restored by COB. I was onsite on Friday, so I didn't mind that so much, but when I came home, it was still choked. I am not going to put a fine point on it. The email I received on Friday was untrue. I do not think you should lie to your customers. If my service was not going to be restored, you should tell me that it would not be.

I received another email on Friday evening telling me that my service would be restored after three working days. This is not acceptable. I will have gone five of the 29 days of the month that I have paid you for without the service you are supposed to be providing. You should restore my service promptly, particularly because I have expressed my concern several times. I am very frustrated at the lack of service and telling me that it will just be restored by the system makes me feel that you simply do not care about something that is very upsetting for me. This does not demonstrate a good service ethos. Also, there never seems to be any delay taking money out of my account. Your system works very well in that regard. I pay by direct debit, so you never receive your money late. You would doubtless become quite aggressive with me if I paid late, yet you are content not to provide the service I paid for.

The email also said that my service is currently unshaped. It is not. I have tested it using two speed tests and it is still at dialup speeds. It is not acceptable that your support lies to me! Clearly, they didn't check my service. I had asked to be telephoned, but again, the delivery of support was by a different method. Had they telephoned, I could have explained that my speed was still shaped, and they could have investigated further. Now I'm stuck with dialup speed and your support think that I have had my service restored. So I have to contact them yet again to try to get my service restored. They also suggested I telephone support if I have a problem. But I had said in my message that I cannot get through on the phone number they supplied. Do they even read what we write? Why didn't someone phone me?

It is not acceptable to retrigger broadband speed when you send out invoices. You need to restart the service at 12.01am on the first of the month. It is not acceptable that when I contact you, someone tells me that it will just work itself out. They need to be empowered to restore the service straight away. If someone is frustrated and upset, it would seem that good service, which you claim to want to provide, would be to try to help them with the problem. Your support gives the impression of simply saying whatever they need to to make the customer go away.

Furthermore, I asked to be given an address to send a complaint to. This was ignored the first couple of times I asked, and finally, I was simply pointed to the website. It wasn't actually clear where to send a complaint. I do not even know whether this is the correct address. I want what I have to say to be read by someone who is empowered, so that they know how upset I am that you simply do not bother providing the service you claim to. I know how bureaucracies work. I do not want to be replied to by someone saying it'll be looked into, and my email is then filed and forgotten. So when I asked for an address, I actually wanted to be given an address, not a page on your website. Which, you may remember, I can only access on dialup speed.

I am now going to have to find another provider. This is in itself a distressing prospect, because getting the line reprogrammed takes forever, and given my experience with Ozemail, whose actual service (I mean the connection) was bad, you probably are no worse than anyone else. You're just no better either. Luckily, Optus sent me something in the mail yesterday, and they have some attractive plans. Maybe they will care more about what I want and less about their system.

Thanks for your attention. I'm sorry this email has been so long. You have no idea how frustrating it is to feel that the "support" of a company you pay for a service is basically lying to you to make you go away, and has no intention of resolving your problem or helping you with it. It's almost as though you make things as difficult as possible so that customers are discouraged from seeking support in the first place.

Friday, February 01, 2008

blah

so anyway, i have nothing to say that wouldn't sound exactly like that skreee noise the AC in my car makes when it's on number 3. the worst of it is that my man has no mull, so the wheels in my head are spinning like neutron stars, and I have no means of slowing them down.

skreeeeeee. my broadband has been shaped, and hasn't been reset for february.skreeeeeee. people i work for have "restructured" and that means i'm sacked. 10 hours a week down the drain.skreeeeeee. other woman i work for has fucked off on leave for two months and didn't bother telling me. i'm guessing she plans to talk to me some time about never. skreeeeeee. author of recession book is arsehole and whined to my boss. fucked that then. the rights and wrongs don't matter. if authors are unhappy and their books sell more than three copies, editors get blamed. skreeeeeee. author of value investing book was even bigger arsehole. fucked there as well. i know. it sounds like it's me, but it's not. i get given the shithouse authors because i'm freelance and inhouse girls are more fragile. skreeeeeee. i have no mull and no sign of any on the horizon. i. could. kill. someone. i'm. not. kidding.skreeeeeee. i will not have enough money to go home to england. skreeeeeee. i will not have a weekend again because mrs zen went out tonight and i have six hours to do on chapter 7 and maybe the same to get it into shape. skreeeeeee. skreeeeeeee. skreeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

well, whatever, deep breath. deep deep breath. we'll work on poker, practise massage, meditate, masturbate. i'll be all right, i'll be your light. i have made a big spreadsheet. sixteen 16s at 10% is 33 dollars american an hour. that's okay. that's more than okay as a step to making it. CAN I DO THAT? CAN I DO IT, I DON'T KNOW, BUT MAYBE I JUST GOT A BREAK AND CAN TRY FOR IT, WHAT DO YOU THINK?